During the war, the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad formed part of a rail network carrying vital supplies north to Confederate forces in Virginia, making its destruction an important Union objective. On July 5, 1863, Lt. Col. George W. Lewis’s 3rd New York Cavalry struck Warsaw at 6 a.m. after burning the Confederate States Armory at Kenansville the previous day and taking a large amount of Confederate money from a safe. Lewis’s primary mission was to demolish the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad, and his troopers destroyed two miles of track and telegraph wire by removing the wire and cutting down the poles. In Warsaw they also destroyed two rail cars, a freight house full of Confederate stores, about 4,000 barrels of resin and turpentine, and some gunpowder. Lewis’s men left with about 150 head of livestock, several bags of mail, and 30 prisoners, while about 400 black men, women, and children followed the Union force as it rode back east through Kenansville toward Trenton that afternoon. Along the way, the Federals burned a barn containing hundreds of pounds of bacon, and the smell lingered in the area for several days. Lewis’s departure may have been influenced in part by the nearness of four companies of Confederate infantry and four artillery pieces stationed ten miles south at Magnolia, where a locomotive had pulled fourteen empty boxcars from Warsaw to collect the troops before Lewis arrived, but they did not come and his attack and withdrawal went unimpeded.